Mormon Walmart Conscripts Customers

Until now, you wrote off Walmart and refused to get suckered into the self-righteous indignation game, purple ribbons aside…

They can exploit all the immigrant workers they want, but now, Walmart is coming to exploit your labor, oh middle America.

Breck snapped this camera photo at his local Walmart in south Utah. He writes:

“Walmart here is ridiculous, it is the lifeline of this town. We have two Super Wal-Marts on either end of St. George, and the “great” distribution center with the Now Hiring sign up 24/7, 365 days a year. The sign reads “ATTENTION CUSTOMERS Bring a shpping cart from the parking lot in with you and receive a ticket for a weekly drawing to win one of two $25 gift cards.”

Look they even provide the sanitizer wipes!”

Those everyday low prices don’t come cheap, everyone needs to pitch in and bus their own parking spot.

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Big deal. I go to Trader Joe’s every Sunday and on my walk over, I collect the carts that are left on Ventura Boulevard and take them back in. It makes the area look a little less like a ghetto. I’m young, reasonably strong, and headed in that direction anyway, so who cares if I’m not getting paid for my two minutes of oh-so-strenous exercise?

What’s wrong with this? It’s not like they’re forcing anyone to return carts, and they’re providing customers with an incentive to help them keep costs down. If you want to leave your shopping cart blocking a handicapped space, that’s all right, too.

I don’t see it as any different from the signs in the Ikea cafe that gently request that people bus their own tables so that they can continue to provide low prices.

They were providing low prices *before* they asked you to return the carts themselves.
Plus Walmart has corrals where the carts are supposed to go, and people whose job is is to go get them.

Walmart keeps their prices low because they bully their vendors, underpay the help, and provide lower-than-average products and services, NOT because the average joe consumer ‘does his part.’

I think we should go to walmart and take all the carts to the farthest reaches of the parking lot and leave them there. It would expel the same amount of effort and I bet a million bazillion dollars that it won’t have the slightest impact on the price of the junk they sell there.

If there are more carts left in the parking lot, that means Wal-Mart has to hire more cart crew workers. Add an extra cart crew worker to each of Wal-Mart’s 3,800 stores in America, and it could get costly.

The incentives may also have additional morale benefits. According to the Weather Channel, the high today in St. George, Utah is 96 degrees. More customers returning their carts means less cart hauling in the hot midday sun (this could also mean fewer employees injured on the job from heat stroke, etc.).

Well, in the case of Le Mart du Wal, I’d agree with you, except that the only way I’d be caught in that store with the ability to move carts out of it is if it were a tornado shelter and I had no other alternatives.